On May 24, 1997, what she remembered as “Dump Day” in their love affair, a 22-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky was reminiscing in typically intimate terms with the president of the United States about his childhood.
“The President explained,” as the Federal Bureau of Investigation later paraphrased the words she heard from Bill Clinton, “that during his life he had been two people, and kept up two fronts … that starting in the third or fourth grade, he was a good boy with his mother and stepfather, but also began telling stories and leading a secret life.” Typically unimaginative about the human heart, the official summary of the conversation stops with that remarkable passage, leaving the rest to history.
On May 27, 1997, Taylor Branch, an old Clinton friend and eminent biographer of Martin Luther King Jr., met the president for another of their 72 private sessions over the eight years of the Clinton presidency, from 1993 to 2001, a kind of contemporaneous oral history that makes up this uniquely promising and ultimately saddening book.
The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, by Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster, 708 pages. $35
In their usual practice for the customary 90 minutes, Branch prompting here and there but most of the time Clinton rambling about recent preoccupations, the subjects are Mexico and Central America, cigarette use in children, partial birth abortion, Republican disarray and division among Democrats – but with not a trace of the president's fascinating confession to his mistress three days before.
It is not surprising. Lewinsky got one Bill Clinton, Branch the other. Despite an accomplished historian's unprecedented access to a sitting U.S. president, we are still left to fathom the Clinton twins and their fateful consequences.
This book grew out of a worthy venture in real-time history, albeit fraught with potential compromise. Young Southerners Branch and Clinton were roommates in Texas in the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern, along with the then Hillary Rodham. Over the next two decades, they went their separate if mutually admiring ways as journalist and politician until, on the eve of his first inauguration, Clinton invited Branch to take up their “interviews,” a veritable oral diary with a supposedly unrestrained interlocutor, as an ongoing account of his presidency. Tapes of the meetings, which Branch never heard, were to remain with Clinton as an aid to his eventual memoirs.
Bill Clinton being Bill Clinton, it is often a dazzling show, full of biting portraits and ruminations
Both men understood, however, that the author might write his own subsequent book from the most extensive private conversations of their kind in American history – indeed in the history of high office anywhere in the modern world. The Clinton Tapes thus refers not to Clinton's words but to recordings made by Branch of his own recollections after each session as he drove home from the White House.
From that, he writes 40 occasionally colourful, always earnest chapters in which he sees himself as a “participant in a memoir” portraying the president “candidly in texture.” Yet the seductions of proximity are lethal. Branch is far more sympathizer and intellectual co-dependent than an even mildly neutral oral historian. The empathetic but critical, thoroughly informed perspectives he brought to his multivolume portrait of Rev. King sadly desert him – or are jettisoned – in one of the most extraordinary opportunities ever given a historian. The result does little service to either the author or his subject.
